


syncopate

by ssstrychnine



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mostly Fluff, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 02:27:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5767780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>eugene goes looking. snafu eats cake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	syncopate

Snafu leaves while Eugene sleeps, doesn’t sleep, holds himself so still he can feel his skeleton vibrating. His eyelids are heavy and closed and his skin is raw, like with the right breeze he might slip out of it, down to just those shaking bones. Snafu is footsteps in his head, closer to his pulse than his heart is; two steps, two beats, and then a pause. Eugene can’t open his eyes, can’t even look at Snafu in this moment, he is scared of the expression that might be on his face. Snafu with something open and closed sketched out in his eyes, like a drawing done by a child, smudged at the edges, bright as a new penny. Eugene is sure he cannot bear it. 

So Snafu leaves and Eugene’s heart starts beating again. He presses his fingertips to the window but doesn’t look through the glass. He scribbles something in his book that might be a name or a word or something in between. He doesn’t think there can be a word to explain how he feels then, alone on a train, alone after war. It’s like being awake and outdoors before the sun rises when everything is empty and huge. Still, grey light and the grass wet on your feet and a thunderstorm purple on the horizon but it’s not quite raining yet. Snafu is swallowed by New Orleans already and Eugene is set for Mobile, Alabama with flat lawns and wicker chairs and there's nothing to be done. 

He does not settle easy. It’s too quiet in his parents house and he crashes into side tables and knocks silver platters to the floor to get some noise in the air and his mother makes a sound in the back of her throat that is really just another sort of silence. He treks around their land, trying to find a piece of dirt that will feel like Peleliu did under his boots. Everything is soft; the grass, the earth, the sky. He leaves most of his dinner on his plate in the evenings and marvels at the waste. He thinks of Snafu and hopes that Louisiana is louder and harder than Alabama is. 

Sid makes it a little easier. In him Eugene can see what he might be like later, when he’s scored what he can of the war from his flesh. Sid dancing with a girl, Sid with an easy smile, Sid with a flask in his pocket everywhere he goes. 

“Do you talk to your...to the others?” Eugene asks one day, pulling grass out from its roots.

“I write letters some,” Sid shrugs. “There’s never much to say.” 

Eugene avoids the VA office entirely because he is not sure he can stop himself asking after Merriell Shelton. He has not once said the name aloud but it sits at the back of his tongue, waiting to break his teeth if he slips up. Three syllables should not seem so violent but me-rri-ell digs ashy fingertips into his brain. He wonders what he’s doing now, Merriell the stranger, Snafu the... what? Snafu who is not a friend because their relationship doesn’t exist outside the war. Snafu who has held cigarettes so close to Eugene's lips that he could have opened his mouth to bite them. Snafu who watched him with lamplight eyes.

In his dreams he picks out all the ways Snafu moves. The way his hands fall from his wrists, his broken fingers, the squared bone at the base of his thumb. His skeleton seems close to the surface, like it’s always a moment away from breaking through. These movements are more real in Eugene’s dreams than they had ever been when they were together. There had been no time to spend a thousand seconds exploring the way the dirt and mud settled at the hollow of Snafu’s throat or the way he kept his limbs held close to his chest, like he might one day fold in on himself, small enough to disappear. 

“You’re makin’ me blush, Sledgehammer,” he whispers close, drawing out the words like molasses, and it’s almost as bad as the dreams he has of dying.

It’s his father who pulls him out of it, just a little, just enough. Because his father knows something of the edge-of-the-world feeling Eugene has brought back with him. To be able to cry seems a miracle and it doesn’t stick but it does make it easier to move through a world in peacetime. It shakes out his limbs and stretches out his muscles. He watches birds, focusing on the colours of their feathers and the way their wings hit the air, and seeing something living helps too.

It still takes him more than a year to get to the VA office. He goes with Sid, married not buried, to talk about university and a future that isn’t tied to violence. It doesn’t feel like _his_ future but he does it all the same. And he asks the address of Merriell Shelton when Sid has turned away and the scrap of paper he takes it down on moves between the pockets of his trousers, always folded soft at his fingertips.

He lasts a week with the address in his head. He paces the hallways of his home and he doesn’t knock things to the floor anymore but his footsteps are loud enough that his mother frays at the edges. He helps her plant roses on the day that he leaves and he kisses her on the cheek and she looks at him like he’ll never come back all over again. At least he told her himself this time, he reasons, and it’s not the same thing, not even close.

It’s the first time he’s been on a train since Snafu left him sleeping. It has a different feel to it than carriages packed to the brim with marines, hollow-eyed and restless. A pretty girl in blue smiles at him and there are more old woman than there are able bodied men. He tears a napkin to shreds and writes nonsense in his book and tries to remember the sound of Snafu’s voice, so it isn’t shocking when he hears it.

He gets to New Orleans mid afternoon and it’s humid and some women carry parasols and some wear broad-brimmed straw hats. Eugene tugs his tie loose and then gives it to a kid with bare feet and wickedness in his laughter. The address takes him through alleys and over bridges and an old man laughs at him when he asks for directions. It is not a city of straight lines but he gets there eventually and he knocks sharply on the door before his body revolts. 

Snafu opens the door half-clothed and when he realises who it is he stumbles back like he’s expecting a bloodied nose. 

“Snaf,” says Eugene, inadequate really, and the name dies in his throat.

They stare at one another, a few feet between them, Snafu with eyes wide and his hands crooked at the wrist, and Eugene with his hands in his pockets, thumbing at the address he has kept with him since he got it.

“Mm,” mumbles Snafu finally and he steps out of the doorway and Eugene walks inside.

Snafu’s home is two rooms, bed and bath, and everything smells pleasantly of sawdust. His bed is rusted brass and there’s a half empty bookshelf and a chest at the foot of the bed and not much else. It looks like a barracks. His feet are bare and his chest is bare and one of his hands is in his hair, pinching curls between fingers.

“I should have written,” says Eugene, folding his arms and unfolding them. “But I couldn’t think of anything to write.”

“Tha’s a first,” murmurs Snafu and he rolls his eyes when the silence stretches. It doesn’t seem to matter though, they spoke little enough tied together by their boot strings and Eugene sits on the chest and Snafu brings across a bottle of something clear and burning and sits on the bed, close enough to touch. 

Three drinks in and Snafu is chain smoking and chewing on this thumb and his mouth looks smudged and swollen. Eugene keeps his eyes on his lap, on the glass he’s cradling there, braced against his ankles, cool and wet. They have still barely spoken, just pleasantries, or as pleasant as Snafu is likely to get, nothing poison coming off his tongue. Eugene learns that he is working with timber and that explains the sawdust smell and Eugene tells him that he’s got no girl and that explains why he’s there at all. 

“I’m not gonna dig you out of whatever hole you’re in,” Snafu tells him, his grin lazy and reckless. “You shouldn’t’ve come here, Gene.”

“You’re wrong,” Eugene replies, thinking that his voice is velvet on his name. “You know you’re wrong.” 

Snafu huffs out a laugh around the lip of the bottle but doesn’t deny it.

Eugene swaps the glass for the bottle eventually and they pass it between them and slip into loose-limbed drunkenness. Eugene rests his head against the wall, rolls the glass between his palms. Snafu hugs his knees to his chest and rests his head on them, face tilted toward Eugene, heavy-lidded and soft in the dying light.

“Wasn’t you I was leaving on the train,” Snafu says finally, slurring the words into caramel, and he drains the last of the sharp spirit and rolls the bottle across the floor.

“I know,” says Eugene. “I wouldn’t’ve wanted you to stay.” 

“Liar.”

“Maybe.” 

“Come here.”

Eugene moves, standing up from his seat on the chest and closing the space between them. He sits down next to him and the bed sinks under their combined weight. Eugene laughs a little. Snafu shuts his eyes. They are not closer than they had been in their shared foxholes. They are not closer than the war had made them. But Snafu seizes his hand, grip like a vice, and tangles their fingers together like nothing could break them apart. It hurts a little, but it’s a good sort of pain, their palms crashing together, their bones lining up like there’s a mirror between them. 

They only stay like this for a moment before Snafu is moving again, letting go of Eugene’s hand (and that hurts worse), pulling himself clumsily across his lap. He pushes a knee between Eugene’s thighs, he braces him against the wall, hands on either side of his head, and his eyes are wide and knife-sharp and for a moment Eugene thinks he’s about to die. But then all the tension goes out of him and his body falls out of its rigid lines. He collapses into Eugene like a puppet cut from its strings and he tangles his hands in the collar of his shirt and presses his face against his neck. Eugene doesn’t move, hardly even breathes. Snafu mumbles something wordless against his skin and his mouth is soft and wet but there are teeth there too and Eugene doesn’t know what to do with his hands and he is too close and too drunk and.... 

“I’m...I’m can’t,” he starts, grasping at the words through the scent of Snafu’s skin and the warmth of the alcohol in his blood. He takes hold of Snafu’s wrists and it’s all it takes to get Snafu to move and he has pulled out of Eugene’s grip and is on his feet in an instant, his expression wary, the shadows under his eyes purpled in the twilight room.

“I’m goin’ for chow,” he says, like he wasn’t mouthing words against Eugene’s pulse a moment ago. “Come or stay or...” His mouth twists and he walks over to the chest. He pulls out a linen shirt and shrugs it on and Eugene stands up, feeling dizzy and sick and irritated.

“Merriell,” he says, feeling desperate, but Snafu’s expression turns dangerous then.

“Who’s that?” he asks, tilting his chin, and when Eugene doesn't reply he opens the door and steps out onto the busy New Orleans street.

Eugene follows him, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else and Snafu moves through the crowd like he’s being pulled on a rope. The air is thick and hot, only a little cooler in the dark, and Snafu is moving so fast and sure that Eugene has to trot to keep up with him. They end up at some hole in the wall dinner place with a wobbly table and two mismatched chairs out front and Snafu barks out an order to the old man sitting at the counter then slumps into a chair and lights a cigarette, his hands moving blade-sharp near his face, the flame from his lighter haloing him in gold.

Eugene sits more slowly, holding himself still, keeping careful distance between him and the heat Snafu is radiating. He looks frantic and tired and Eugene doesn’t know why but he remembers D-day, Snafu throwing up on the boat, not seasick but something else. He remembers thinking maybe a squared jaw and hooded eyes weren’t everything Snafu was and later, when he takes gold from the mouth of a dead man, he remembers it again, not an excuse but something necessary to keep him separate from their enemy. 

“What are we eating?” he asks, trying to keep his voice light. Snafu sniffs, drags hard on the cigarette, licks his lips, doesn’t reply. “ _Snafu_ ,” he tries and he does look up at that.

“Special,” he says shortly. “It’s good.” 

The air outside the shop smells of heat and spice and when the chef brings out two massive slices of striped cake, Eugene thinks something must have gone wrong with the order. But Snafu stubs out his cigarette and picks up a piece and takes an enormous bite. When he notices Eugene staring he grins, open mouthed and gleeful, and all the tension falls from his shoulders.

“You eat cake for dinner?” 

“You don’t?” Snafu retorts, voice muffled around his mouthful. 

Eugene eats his cake and it’s good of course, lemon and custard, but it’s not as good as chocolate at the corners of Snafu’s mouth. It’s not as good as him licking his fingers and tipping his chair back and closing his eyes. Eugene watches this through his eyelashes and he’s sure Snafu knows it because a smile slides across his face like sun over water. Eugene has seen him throw pebbles into the ruin of a man's skull but here he is stretched out like a cat with cake crumbs around his mouth and it feels like something from a dream.

“Am I awake? Is this real?” Eugene asks, half joking, but Snafu opens one of his eyes and tips his chair forward and then he’s someone different again, leaning on his elbows, eyes narrowed and intense.

“Your head alright, Sledgehammer?” he asks. “You war-sick still?”

“I’d be dead if I weren’t.” 

“Mm,” Snafu concedes, tipping himself back again. Closing his eyes again.

Back at his home, Eugene pushes Snafu up against a wall and he is grinning when they finally kiss. The taste of chocolate is there still and the bite of teeth is there still and it’s not soft, not sweet, but hard and fast and bloody-minded. Snafu makes noises, little sighs and sharp cut laughs and muffled groans. Eugene cannot touch him enough, the way their skin feels together makes him dizzy, heart-sick, edge-of-the-world excited, like he’s been waiting for this all his life. Like this makes the whole war worth it. 

“You’re makin’ me blush, Sledgehammer,” Snafu murmurs, coming up for air, and Eugene can do nothing but grab him by the collar and haul him, laughing, to the bed.

**Author's Note:**

> um so i accidentally saw a gif from this show like ten days ago and ten episodes later i've lost all control. how does rami malek move like that? someone tell me please. anyway i'm sure this is a quiet fandom but thank you for reading it and maybe liking it. maybe. the cake is doberge which looks fucking delicious im gonna make it, 17 layers and all. im on tumblr @oneangryshot if you wanna cry about this show with me o/


End file.
